Without requiring any specialist knowledge of music or science, "The Music Instinct" explores how the latest research in music psychology and brain science is piecing together the puzzle of how our minds understand and respond to music. Ranging from Bach fugues to Javanese gamelan, from nursery rhymes to heavy rock, Philip Ball interweaves philosophy, mathematics, history and neurology to reveal why music moves us in so many ways.
Reviews
Standpoint
Jessica Duchen
"[A] tour-de-dorce… He makes occasional judgments with which I would take issue — such as certain remarks about Sibelius, who was one of the strongest voices of his day — but these are small points in a volume that represents an extraordinary achievement of explication concerning the science of an art and the art of its science."
08/03/2010
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The Sunday Times
Bee Wilson
"Wonderful... I defy anyone to read this book without coming away better informed about why music affects us in such a profound way… His passion for music is evident on every page, and his enthusiasms (whether for gamelan or Glenn Gould) are infectious. Most powerful is his message that music is a part of the chaos and splendour of human life itself."
08/03/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Tom Payne
"His mastery of many scientific disciplines is a delight... Given this encyclopedic approach, you might expect Ball to offer an answer to every mystery that music poses. However, another good thing about this book is that the author is so well-informed that when he states that we just don’t know certain things, you trust him."
08/03/2010
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The Sunday Telegraph
Damian Thompson
"Ball takes swipes at fogeys as well as modernists: he notes, for example, that when Roger Scruton compares the classical masters to degenerate pop music, he chooses bad pop music, which is 'rather like assuming that classical music is equally well represented by Czerny or Beethoven’. That’s a beautifully crafted jibe and there’s a lively humour throughout this book which makes up for any disappointment we might feel at its necessarily tentative conclusion."
08/03/2010
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The Economist
The Economist
"If you can read music, you will find yourself humming aloud to see what he means. If you can’t, you might occasionally get lost among the technicalities. But before things get too rarefied, Mr Ball’s facility for conveying complex facts in simple language comes to the rescue. His basic message is encouraging and uplifting: people know much more about music than they think."
04/02/2010
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The Financial Times
Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
"Despite Ball’s fluent writing, and the argument that we all in a sense know how to read music, there are times when the book resembles a particularly tricky Schoenberg concerto. Statements such as “Relative to the original C, this new note has a frequency greater by a factor 3/2 x 3/2, or 9/4, and it corresponds to the note D” left me feeling like Spinal Tap’s clueless guitarist Nigel Tufnel. (Ball, musical omnivore, mentions him too.) Yet the effort is handsomely rewarded. One small cavil: I would have liked more discussion about artificial intelligence and music."
08/03/2010
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The Independent
Marek Kohn
"One of his great strengths, besides the breadth and solidity of his knowledge, is his consistent refusal to turn intriguing but incomplete evidence into glib take-home stories. Instead, he is meticulous in his attention to both the details and the limits on what they can tell us at present. The book is labelled "popular science" on the back: publishing would be a far better place if popular science books were all as truly scientific in spirit as this one."
08/03/2010
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The Observer
Guy Dammann
"Despite its breezy tone, The Music Instinct's greatest virtue consists in conveying the impression that answers to genuine questions about music won't come to anyone in too much of a hurry… Indeed, it is the necessarily temporal structure of musical experience, and the way that musical "ideas" cannot be reduced to instantly communicable concepts, that guarantees its importance to us."
08/03/2010
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The Guardian
Steven Poole
"In the modern pop-cognitivepsychology genre, the reader is usually well advised to imbibe gratefully the reported data while taking the overarching "lessons" with a very large pinch of salt, and that is the way to read Ball's flawed but fascinating work. It will be the rare music-lover who does not come away without having learned many interesting things; but aesthetics cannot be replaced wholesale by bean-counting analysis."
08/03/2010
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